User Equipments (UE) are enabled to communicate wirelessly in a radio communications system, sometimes also referred to as a radio communications network, a mobile communication system, a wireless communications network, a wireless communication system, a cellular radio system or a cellular system. The communication may be performed via a radio channel, e.g. between a UE and a web server via a Radio Access Network (RAN) and possibly one or more core networks, comprised within the wireless communications network.
A cellular radio system covers a geographical area which is divided into cell areas, wherein each cell area is served by a network node such as a base station. In 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Long Term Evolution (LTE), base stations may be referred to as eNodeBs or eNBs. The base stations communicate over the air interface operating on radio frequencies with the user equipments within range of the base stations.
3GPP LTE radio access standard has been written in order to support high bitrates and low latency both for uplink and downlink traffic. All data transmission in LTE is controlled by the radio base station.
In the context of this disclosure the expression downlink will be used for the transmission path from the base station to the user equipment. The expression uplink will be used for the transmission path in the opposite direction i.e. from the user equipment to the base station.
A primary function of a web server is to cater web pages according to requests of user equipments using a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). This means delivery of HyperText Markup Language (HTML) documents and any additional content that may be included by a document, such as images, style sheets and scripts.
Web page browsing contributes to a large portion of the data traffic in mobile networks. However, it may provide unsatisfactory user experience due to a slow download time of a web page.
An uplink grant pre-allocation reserves resources for a user equipment before a Scheduling Request (SR) is sent, thus it enables uplink packets to be sent sooner. It reduces the acknowledge time of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). With a shorter round trip time, it is possible to reduce the total download time of the web page. However, since the uplink grant pre-allocation reserves resources, the total system capacity is reduced.